Colloquium 2: Commentary on Shaw

Abstract In “Aristotle, Empedocles, and the Unity of All Things,” Michael Shaw has provided a novel and intriguing account of Empedocles’ cosmology, wherein he attempts to outline a few ways in which interpreters (beginning with Aristotle) have failed to capture fully Empedocles’ most important ideas. Central to Shaw’s account of Empedoclean cosmology is a distinctive interpretation of the life cycle of the cosmos that presupposes that the four elements that make up everything and the twin forces that govern them—Love and Strife—interact in ways quite different than often is supposed. The upshot of this is that Shaw thinks Empedocles’ theory may not fall prey to the Aristotelian critiques designed to undermine it because they are based on a misunderstanding of his actual view. While I am sympathetic to his impulse to defend Empedocles against Aristotle’s attacks, I am not convinced that Shaw’s reading should be widely adopted, both because I highly doubt that the depiction of Empedoclean cosmology developed by Shaw is Empedocles’ own and because I think the traditional interpretation of Empedocles’ cosmology fares better against Aristotelian critiques than Shaw’s interpretation of it does. Such are the contentions I intend to show in what follows.